


Number Seven

by CarpeDiemForLife



Series: The Loneliest Number [7]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26878189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarpeDiemForLife/pseuds/CarpeDiemForLife
Summary: All of the Hargreeves children know what it is to be lonely. It claims them each in different ways and at different times, but loneliness is the family's constant companion.--Series of ficlets examining the loneliness of each character. Seventh: Vanya.
Series: The Loneliest Number [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885654
Kudos: 19





	Number Seven

A sympathetic soul might read Vanya Hargreeves’s autobiography and think she had never known anything in her life but loneliness.

They would be incorrect. She had once known its opposite, and that made her present state of loneliness so much worse.

Had she never known what she was missing, she could not be so desperately, agonizingly unhappy as she was now. Once, she knew kinship. She cared for all her siblings, but Five and Ben were her best friends, her confidants. Yes, she was still lonely even then, a gulf between herself and her siblings thanks to their father, but her loneliness was tempered by love and companionship.

Then Five ran away.

As though she were the one responsible for corrupting Five, Sir Reginald Hargreeves increased her isolation, kept her as separate from the others as possible. Even Ben abandoned her. As the years passed, her siblings became more and more dismissive, more and more hostile, taking on their father’s feelings towards her as their own. Vanya wasn’t just alone, she was unwanted, and no one hesitated to make that known to her. The fact that she still loved her siblings even though they did not love her only poured salt into the wound.

Though not the only Hargreeves plagued by loneliness, hers was the most evil. Unlike her siblings, Vanya’s loneliness wasn’t secret or hidden away—it was simply deemed unimportant. Seen, but ignored.

Just like her.

More than any other’s, _her_ loneliness was imposed on her with intention. Purposeful malice rather than the result of fate, accident, or choice. Vanya was therefore not only lonely but truly alone, apart; judged undeserving and unloved. No one to comfort her with words of kindness, no grand destiny or purpose to keep her going. Like an infection, Vanya’s loneliness ravaged her spirit until it was weak and sickly, her life nothing but a gaping hole. Numb.

Little did she know, little did _any_ of them know, that this numbness was all that stood between the Earth and total destruction. For when the numbness was at last taken away, her loneliness was too great, too vast to be contained. She became loneliness incarnate, and ate the world.

Unconscious in her brother’s arms, Vanya was accepted into the circle of her family for the first time. No longer alone, unwanted, or unloved, but chosen and cherished.

The world ended before she could wake up to see it.

Hopefully the next world would be kinder to her, to all of them. Hopefully there, the Hargreeves siblings could unlearn seven lifetimes of loneliness.

Together.

**Author's Note:**

> Well this series was a fun writing exercise! Sorry this last one took so long to come out, but thanks so much to anyone still with me at this point <3


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